Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940
As I was crossing Alexanderplatz on the first of April, I noticed a crowd of people gathering near the U-Bahn station at the other end of the square. The loudspeakers blared across the open space,…
A Yiddish Writer Who Writes in French
I belong to that peculiar generation of Jews who have the duty to speak Yiddish, my mother tongue, in a tongue at once familiar and “foreign”—French. Though Yiddish is still used as a vernacular…
On the Edge of the World
Every day at siesta time, when under the scorching heat of the sun the little town of Kenadza was breathing its last, Madame Karsenty would settle down on the sofa in the living room where her son…
Anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement
Why now? Why write about anti-Semitism in the Women’s Movement when we have the Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan to worry about?Because, very simply, it’s there. And because I am a Jew who has been…
Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the Search for Identity
At first the contrast between them must seem very sharp: the first a somewhat fantastic figure, an ambitious opportunist, a social and political adventurer, flamboyant, over-dressed, the epitome of…
The Jewish Century
The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century. Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually…
New Jerusalem Old Athens: The Holy Middle
This rediscovery of Judaism at the end of the end of philosophy, at the tertium quid, the middle of ethics, occurs at the deepest difficulty of both philosophy and Judaism, where they are equally cast…
Diving into the Wreck
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am…
Woodchucks
Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits…
Jacob the Liar
And the resistance, I will be asked: Where is the resistance? Could it be that the heroes are gathering in the shoe factory or in the freight yard, at least a few? Is it possible that at the ghetto’s…
Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations
[ . . . ] On a terribly cold winter night when a snowstorm was blowing, all prisoners were punished by being forced to stand at attention without overcoats—they never wore any—for hours. This was…
The Chosen
For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other’s existence. [ . . . ]
Danny and I probably would never have met—or we…